Special Issue : Microsoft Build 2025: Ushering in the Age of AI Agents
May 20th 2025 | Superintelligence Newsletter
Hey Superintelligence Fam đ
Yesterday, Microsoft held its annual Build conference - and while there was the usual mix of demos and developer talk, something more foundational was quietly taking shape. Instead of adding features around the edges, Microsoft is nudging the software world toward a different model of interaction entirely: one where agentsânot apps - become the main way we get things done.
Letâs unpack what actually happened and why it matters.
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đčïž Agents, Not Apps? Microsoftâs Bet on the âAgentic Webâ
Satya Nadella opened the event with a clear message: weâre moving into a world where AI agents handle tasks on our behalf - proactively, across apps, and with some degree of decision-making autonomy.
Think of them less like Alexa, and more like adaptable co-workers that operate in the background, carrying out multi-step goals like organizing data, coordinating between services, or summarizing your calendar.
This isnât about replacing humans. Itâs about rethinking how users interact with software - less clicking and searching, more asking and delegating. Microsoft is calling this the âOpen Agentic Webâ, where agents from different developers can work together across platforms. Early days, but the architecture theyâre building could lead to broader interoperability standards.
đ§âđ» GitHub Copilot Steps Into the Driverâs Seat
One of the more practical changes was how GitHub Copilot is evolving. Itâs gone from a helpful suggestion tool to something more active. With the new Copilot Workspace, you can give it a goal (e.g. âAdd user login with password resetâ), and itâll lay out a plan, write the code, and update documentation. You still review and approve, but the agent is doing more of the heavy lifting up front.
Itâs not perfect, and you wouldnât want it pushing changes to production on its own yetâbut itâs an early look at how agentic software might fit into real workflows.
đ NLWeb: Making the Web Understand Language Natively
A quieter but potentially significant announcement was NLWebâa protocol that lets websites describe their functionality in a way AI agents can understand and respond to natural language queries.
Created by R.V. Guha (of RSS and Schema.org fame), NLWeb could make websites more accessibleâboth to users and to the growing number of AI tools navigating the web. Instead of clicking around a support page, you might just say, âI want to return a product I bought last week,â and the agent knows exactly what to do.
đ€ xAI Models Coming to Azure
In a somewhat unexpected turn, Microsoft is now hosting Elon Muskâs xAI models (Grok-3 and Grok-3 Mini) on Azure. Whatever your take on the rivalry between OpenAI and xAI, this move reinforces Microsoftâs position as a model-agnostic cloud provider. They're clearly betting on offering a buffet of foundation modelsâfrom OpenAI to Mistral to Meta to xAIârather than locking users into one ecosystem.
𧩠Multi-Agent Collaboration in Copilot Studio
Microsoft also showed off multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio. This lets developers create systems where several agents handle parts of a larger task. Think of one agent fetching data, another transforming it, and a third preparing a summaryâall coordinated in real-time.
Itâs still early-stage, and getting multiple agents to work in sync reliably is tricky. But the direction is promising for those building more complex, automated workflows.
đȘ Windows Gets AI SmarterâSubtly
Beyond cloud and code, a few Windows updates stood out:
Edit on Windows: A clean, terminal-based text editor now built into the OS. Not revolutionary, but handy.
AI Actions in File Explorer: Right-click to summarize a doc or tweak an image using AI. Small, but time-saving.
WSL Goes Open Source: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open-sourceâmaking it easier for devs to shape how Linux runs within Windows.
đ Responsible AI: Healthcare and Accessibility Frontlines
To their credit, Microsoft spotlighted a few social impact use cases:
MyEngine helps people with hearing challenges by understanding and translating regional dialects.
Cancer Copilots organize and surface patient info to help doctors plan treatments more efficiently.
These arenât headline-stealing features, but theyâre thoughtfulâand show how AI can serve outside of profit-driven contexts too.
Our Final Thoughts
Microsoft Build 2025 didnât feel like an all-out reinvention, but it did hint at a meaningful shift in how we think about user interfaces, automation, and the future of the web.
The idea of agentic software isnât newâbut whatâs changing is the infrastructure and ecosystem to make it possible. And Microsoft, with its mix of cloud, OS, and productivity tools, is in a unique position to stitch that together.
Itâs still early days. But if you're building softwareâor even just trying to stay ahead of how weâll all use software in the next five yearsâitâs worth paying attention. We have google IO kicing off and it will be interesting to see what they will bring to the table.
More details:
đ° Microsoft Build 2025 Book of News
đ§âđŹ GitHub Copilot Agents
đ Open Agentic Web Overview
Thank you for tuning in to this special edition of Superintelligence Newsletter! Stay connected as tomorrow we will be covering Google I/O Day 1.
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Stay curious, stay informed, and keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible!
Until Next Time!
Superintelligence Team.