This week was arguably the most pivotal week of the year for Microsoft. Computex and Build landed back-to-back, giving the tech giant the opportunity to announce the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box as well as teach developers how to build apps for the "age of AI agents."
Microsoft didn’t arrive at the agentic web this week. It started laying the foundation a year ago at Build 2025, then spent the next twelve months turning that architecture into real tools.
That phrase, "age of AI agents," is actually from Frank Shaw's recap of Build 2025, not this year's conference, and that's the point. Microsoft laid the groundwork for the agentic web last year and has spent the past twelve months turning that vision into real tools developers can use.
Here are the key Build 2025 announcements Shaw highlighted:
- GitHub Copilot coding agent and new updates to GitHub Models
- Windows AI Foundry
- Azure AI Foundry Models and new tools for model evaluation
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning and multi-agent orchestration
A major focus of last year's Build conference was supporting open standards and shared infrastructure. Microsoft added first-party support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) across GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, and Windows 11.
Microsoft also introduced a project called NLWeb at Build 2025, which Shaw compared to HTML but for the agentic web.
Fast forward to this year's Build conference and you'll hear many of the same points of emphasis.
"Developers don’t need another way to just build and run an agent or app. They need trust. They need native context and knowledge. Most of all, they need choice to access the right model for the right problem," said Kyle Daigle, Chief Operating Officer of GitHub.
This year Microsoft focused on every layer of the AI stack. The company now has a platform for creating agents, a set of models tuned for agentic workloads, and new tools for building AI‑driven experiences across Windows, the web, and Microsoft 365.
Microsoft IQ is a context layer that grounds agents to world knowledge and enterprise knowledge. In plain English, Microsoft IQ helps models produce results that are based on relevant information rather than bringing in generic data.
Tools that are part of Microsoft IQ ground agents to specific data from organizations, such as communication and documents across Microsoft 365. The newly announced Web IQ grounds agents to the latest information available.
Microsoft also announced an always-on personal work agent called "Scout," an entire family of AI models, and all the remaining pieces to create a full pipeline from building agents to users relying on those agents.
Microsoft spent a year turning the agentic web from a concept into a stack. Build 2026 isn’t a reset, it’s the second half of a plan the company laid out twelve months ago. The next step is seeing whether developers actually build on it.
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