Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) surges Azure AI Foundry capabilities with new models and enterprise-grade features at Build, signalling a push toward an open, agentic web.
Microsoft rolled out Grok 3 from xAI, plus upcoming Flux Pro 1.1 and OpenAI's Sora video-generation model, available today and coming soon. Satya Nadella said we're in the “middle innings” of AI, where “big things happen,” as he unveiled reserved capacity expansions next month across OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Meta and xAI Foundry models and introduced multi-agent orchestration, agentic retrieval, always-on observability and enterprise-grade identity controls.
Foundry Local will let firms run agents on Windows and macOS in the cloud or on-premise, while NLWeb promises an open project to build natural-language interfaces for any website using custom data and the model of their choice.
Copilot Tuning now enables enterprises to fine-tune AI agents with proprietary processes without coding expertise, and Visual Studio integrates Copilot extensions into VS Code starting today, paving the way for Azure SRE agent—an autonomous coding assistant built into GitHub. Microsoft 365 Copilot and Windows have been modernized for the agentic era with a native Model Context Protocol registry, letting agents access diverse data sources and execute actions across applications.
NVIDIA (NVDA, Financial) CEO Jensen Huang noted Azure's supercomputer power has accelerated 40Ă— in two years, while Kevin Scott said new reasoning models enable agents to tackle complex software engineering tasks and OpenAI's Sam Altman called this a rare technological shift. Build also introduced Microsoft Discovery, a science-focused platform for reasoning and research.
Why It Matters: Enterprises can now deploy scalable, customizable AI agents across environments, reducing development friction and accelerating digital transformation as demand for automated software solutions soars.
