All in on AI
Microsoft put a big spotlight on artificial intelligence (AI) agents and the agentic web at its annual Build developer conference in Seattle, Washington.
The company put forth a vision of an “open agentic web” that allows AI agents to make decisions and complete tasks on behalf of users and organizations. To encourage that, Microsoft detailed its support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) along with an open project dubbed NLWeb, which Microsoft likened to HTML but for agents.
MCP is an open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between sources of data and AI tools. Microsoft now supports MCP across its platforms and frameworks, and the company has joined the MCP Steering Committee.
Microsoft detailed two contributions it made to the MCP. The first is an updated authorization specification that will allow people to use existing trusted sign-in methods to give agents access to data and services. The second contribution is the design of an MCP server registry.
Along with MCP support, Microsoft announced its Natural Language (NL) Web open project, which the company thinks can play a “similar role to HTML for the agentic web.”
Microsoft’s goal with NLWeb is to make it the easiest, fastest way to transform website into an AI app. NLWeb enables websites to offer a “conversational interface” so users can interact with web content in a “semantic manner.”
Further, NLWeb endpoints also act as MCP servers, allowing websites to make content discoverable and accessible to AI agents. Read our separate post about how NLWeb works to learn more.
Windows is also getting some enhancements. Microsoft detailed Windows AI Foundry, which is an evolution of Copilot Runtime. AI Foundry is a unified platform to support AI developers with capabilities like Windows ML, Foundry Local and ready-to-use AI APIs powered by built-in Windows models available on Copilot Plus PCs.
Microsoft also announced native support for MCP in Windows 11 and plans to open-source the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The company is introducing Semantic Search APIs that developers can leverage to make powerful new search features that run on-device.
Other notable announcements include updates to coding agents on GitHub, Copilot Tuning and Studio, and more.
GitHub is getting a first-of-its-kind asynchronous coding agent, and Microsoft is updating GitHub Models with prompt management, enterprise controls and more. Additionally, the company is open-sourcing GitHub Copilot Chat in VS Code.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning will allow companies to use their own data, workflows and processes to train models and create agents with low coding required. These agents can handle domain-specific tasks within the Microsoft 365 service boundary. Further, Copilot Studio will allow for multi-agent orchestration, connecting multiple agents together to handle more complex tasks.
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Jonathan Lamont
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