May 19, 2025
BlogTen Takeaways from Microsoft Build 2025
Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference is happening this week in Seattle. No big surprise: All things AI and, specifically, agents, are at the top of the announcement list. Surprise: There was quite a bit of news for those still developing on Windows, too.
In no particular order, here are my top 10 takeaways from Day One of Build:
1. Multi-agent is the new hot. Organizations will soon be able to build multi-agent systems in Copilot Studio, where agents delegate tasks to one another. The agents can be built with the Microsoft 365 Agent Builder, Azure AI Agents Service, and Azure Fabric. The Copilot Studio capability to build multi-agent systems is now in preview.
2. NLWeb is a way to turn websites into agentic apps. Natural Language Web (NLWeb) is a Microsoft-developed project for simplifying the natural language interface for websites. (It’s not clear what, if any, connection that OpenAI has with NLWeb. Other current sponsors of NLWeb include O’Reilly Media, Snowflake, Shopify, Chicago Public Library.) Microsoft says NLWeb was conceived and developed by R.V. Guha, former Google Tech Fellow who recently became a Microsoft CVP and Tech Fellow. Guha is the creator of RSS, RDF and Schema.org.
3. GitHub Copilot is moving from pair programmer to peer programmer. GitHub Coding Agent (“Project Padawan”) is now generally available to all Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro+ customers. The agent is best suited to low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases and can handle things like adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring code, and improving documentation, Microsoft says.
4. Copilot Studio is getting more and more “pro” dev features. As was evident at Ignite last fall, Microsoft increasingly is positioning Copilot Studio, its low-code/no-code development platform, as a tool for professional developers who need more powerful tools to build more complex agents. Microsoft is working on exposing a set of M365 Copilot APIs for developers. (So far, only the retrieval API is available in preview.) Microsoft is working to close the gap between Foundry and Copilot Studio by enabling a Bring Your Own Models from Azure Foundry capability, which is currently in preview.
5. The MCP protocol is becoming increasingly key to building agents. Microsoft has joined the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Steering Committee is integrating MCP support across GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure, Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, Foundry Agents and Windows 11. “Think of MCP as a universal USB-C connector for AI,” linking apps, agents and tooling in a standardized way.
Windows: The Best AI Dev Platform?
6. The Windows 11 Copilot Runtime has been renamed “Windows AI Foundry.” AI Foundry is now Microsoft’s brand for the local-platform versions of Azure AI Foundry and are built for model selection, optimizing, fine-tuning and deployment across client and cloud. Microsoft officials say that Windows ML is the built-in inferencing runtime on Windows. Microsoft also announced a local version of AI Foundry for the Mac. Both of these local Foundry offerings are generally available.
7. Microsoft is open sourcing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). They’ve already open sourced the “Mariner” Linux underpinning and the WSL-g UI layer. Now it also is open-sourcing most of WSL itself for “reasons.” Maybe the community will do something with direct access to WSL APIs? Microsoft also announced plans to open source the GitHub Copilot Chat Extension for VSCode “in the coming weeks.”
8. Microsoft is expanding Entra, Defender for Cloud and Purview by embedding them directly into Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio to help organizations secure AI apps and agents across the entire development lifecycle. Entra Agent ID, a capability meant to manage built using Microsoft tools, as well as across select third parties like ServiceNow and Workday, is now in preview.
9. SQL Server 2025 is now in public preview. The coming release of SQL Server is now available to testers. Microsoft is touting the integration of AI directly into the database engine “enabling more intelligent search.” It also has built-in vector search capabilities.
10. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Special Government Employee and xAI Founder Elon Musk both appeared in Nadella’s keynote — via video. Musk talked up Microsoft hosting Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini in Azure Foundry (like it already does with thousands of third-party models, including DeepSeek). Altman talked about OpenAI’s announcement of its Codex programming assistant (while making sure to show continued excitement about the great Microsoft partnership OpenAI enjoys).
To read about all of the Microsoft Build 2025 announcements, check out the Book of News. Fun Fact: There are more than 300 mentions of “agent” in Microsoft’s Build news. And around 30 mentions of “Copilot.” It’s hard to keep up, especially when it comes to AI branding at Microsoft….
