Microsoft Builds Future with Agentic AI at Center Stage

On May 19th, 2025, Microsoft took a bold step into the future of artificial intelligence with a wave of announcements at its Build 2025 conference. The spotlight was firmly on AI agents—autonomous, task-capable digital entities that are rapidly evolving from assistive tools into fully collaborative partners. Microsoft revealed that usage of these agents has doubled over the past year, signaling a dramatic shift in how AI is being integrated into everyday workflows. Central to this transformation is GitHub Copilot’s newest evolution. What began as a code-suggestion engine has now grown into an active participant in the software development process. Microsoft introduced the Azure Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) agent, integrated directly into GitHub Copilot. This new agent can not only write and debug code, but also execute operational tasks, monitor system health, and respond to infrastructure events. Developers are no longer just writing code with AI—they are working side by side with it. But Microsoft’s ambitions go further. The company also announced that its Azure platform will now support rival AI models, including those from Meta, xAI, and Mistral. This marks a pivot toward openness and interoperability, allowing developers to choose the best model for their specific use case without being locked into a single ecosystem. Microsoft called this vision the “agentic web”—a decentralized environment where intelligent agents from various providers interact and collaborate across platforms and services. The implications are vast. In enterprise settings, AI agents could soon oversee routine operations, orchestrate cloud deployments, or manage customer workflows without constant human supervision. For startups, this means faster product iteration. For researchers, it means tools that adapt in real time to complex goals. The rise of agentic AI hints at a future where software becomes more than a tool—it becomes an intelligent partner in creation and execution. Microsoft’s strategic alignment of infrastructure, openness, and applied AI places it at the forefront of this transformation. If the last decade was about building AI models, the next may be defined by building the agents that use them. Build 2025 marks the beginning of that new chapter, one where intelligence is not just embedded in applications, but driving them forward.