Microsoft Build 2026: Embrace your individuality in the workplace
When developers innovate, platforms evolve. We delve into exploring new tools, dreaming big, and creating. This platform evolution brings more information right to your fingertips, focusing on building quickly, as well as operating, optimizing, and observing effectively. It’s about securing your infrastructure, applications, and agents seamlessly, enabling a smooth process from opening your laptop to launching in production.
Being a developer involves a dual role: you’re both a tinkerer, selecting your tools and models, and an enterprise builder, delivering systems that require governance, security, and trust from the start.
Developers require more than just a means to build and run an agent or application. They need trust, native context, and knowledge, as well as the flexibility to select the appropriate model for each problem. This duality is where Microsoft excels. At Microsoft Build, we explored how we empower developers to innovate in this era of widespread intelligence, offering the necessary controls and security at scale on a platform that’s diverse, open, and adaptable at every layer.
Key Themes
Personalized Intelligence
With the Microsoft Agent Platform, powered by both your context and Microsoft IQ, you can build an agent on GitHub, deploy it to Microsoft Foundry, and optimize it with the best-suited models. This platform helps balance context with governance, security with speed, and models with tools.
A Full Stack Built Your Way
Developers should be able to create using their chosen tools, models, and workflows, from silicon to OS to cloud, starting with Windows. Microsoft is introducing a new developer configuration offering flexibility, an intuitive shell and terminal experience, local sandboxing, and enhanced Windows Subsystem for Linux capabilities.
The Future of Agentic Systems
Agentic systems are advancing from code to fostering human progress, opening new scientific and computational frontiers, all grounded in the same developer platform.
Agents Tailored to You
The unique selling point for organizations is no longer mere access to intelligence but ownership. Your agents should reflect your business logic and workflows. This begins with context. Microsoft IQ, available today, provides a context layer grounding agents in both global and enterprise knowledge. Work IQ, available from June 16, captures workplace intelligence, aiding agents in functioning effectively within your organization. Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ complement this by offering shared semantic foundations over business data.
Web IQ, newly announced, offers the fastest grounding for your agents, providing relevant passages at 2.5 times the speed of other alternatives.
Microsoft Scout, a personal agent for work, is being introduced to Frontier customers. Scout, built on OpenClaw and WorkIQ, preemptively manages tasks like meeting preparations and routine scheduling.
New Model Releases
The Microsoft AI Superintelligence Team has unveiled new models, beginning with MAI-Thinking-1, their first reasoning model. Featuring 35 billion active parameters and a 256K context window, it is available on Foundry in private preview.
Other models include MAI-Image-2.5, useful for creative processes, and MAI Transcribe 1.5, offering accuracy across 43 languages. MAI-Voice-2 also expands language options.
MAI models will be accessible on platforms like Fireworks AI, Baseten, and Open Router.
Security and Governance
Agent 365 enhances security across all agents, and an end-to-end trust stack anchored by open-source projects ensures safety and control. Codename MDASH, a new security system, strengthens defenses by deploying agents to identify vulnerabilities.
The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, designed for sustained workloads, offers powerful AI computing capabilities, and Windows is evolving into an agent-native runtime with Microsoft Execution Containers, providing secure development and deployment environments.
Scientific Advancements
Microsoft Discovery, now available, supports the full science workflow. New quantum computing advancements with the Majorana 2 chip promise significant progress toward scalable quantum machines by 2029.
These announcements are a glimpse into the developments at Build. More sessions and information will be available both virtually and in person. Stay tuned for more in-depth updates.
