Microsoft Build 2025: From Copilot to Windows upgrades, everything that Microsoft announced at its biggest developer event of the year
Microsoft
's yearly Build conference kicked off yesterday, in Seattle, with CEO
Satya Nadella
taking the stage to unveil the company's latest innovations. The four-day event showcased Microsoft's continued push toward AI integration across its ecosystem, with significant upgrades to developer tools,
Windows
features, and cloud capabilities. Here's a rundown of the most important announcements from this year's conference.
GitHub Copilot transforms into a full-fledged AI coding agent
GitHub's AI assistant can now independently fix bugs and build features while developers work on other tasks. The company unveiled a major evolution of GitHub Copilot that turns it from a mere code suggestion tool into an autonomous coding agent. This new version can automatically boot a virtual machine, clone repositories, analyze codebases, and make improvements without constant developer supervision. The agent can fix bugs, add features, improve documentation, and save changes as it works, providing detailed session logs of its reasoning. When finished, it tags developers for review and can automatically address any feedback comments.
Windows AI Foundry brings advanced AI capabilities to local development
Microsoft introduced the Windows AI Foundry, a comprehensive toolkit empowering developers to create AI applications for Windows. The platform supports both pre-built and open-source models through Foundry Local, allowing developers to fine-tune and deploy projects with minimal friction. This announcement comes alongside native support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), often described as the "USB-C of AI apps," which enables AI applications to seamlessly communicate with other apps, web services, and Windows components.
Microsoft 365 gets copilot tuning and multi-agent orchestration
Businesses can now train personalized AI assistants that understand company-specific data and workflows. For Microsoft 365 users, the company unveiled Copilot Tuning, allowing businesses to train AI models on their own data, workflows, and processes. This enables companies to generate content that matches their specific style and language. Additionally, multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio combines the specialized skills of different AI agents to tackle complex business tasks with greater efficiency.
NLWeb protocol reimagines web interactions through natural language
New open protocol allows websites to behave like AI agents, responding to natural language queries. Microsoft introduced NLWeb, an open protocol that transforms how users interact with websites. Rather than navigating through traditional interfaces, users can simply prompt websites for information or to perform specific tasks using natural language. NLWeb supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), making content more discoverable and accessible to AI agents. Technical Fellow Ramanathan V. Guha described this as part of the "fourth revolution" in personal computing—communicating with applications through free-form language.
Azure AI Foundry expands with 1,900+ models including Elon Musk's Grok 3
For cloud developers, Microsoft announced Azure AI Foundry, providing tools to select and test appropriate AI models for various applications. The platform now includes access to xAI's Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models from Elon Musk's company, alongside approximately 1,900 other AI models. Microsoft confirmed these models will be hosted and billed directly by the company, with standard Azure service level agreements.
Windows Subsystem for Linux goes open-source
After nine years, Microsoft open-sources WSL, allowing the developer community to contribute directly to the project. In a significant move for the open-source community, Microsoft announced that its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now open-source. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri explained that this long-requested feature required significant operating system refactoring to allow WSL to function independently, enabling developers to make contributions that Microsoft can integrate into the Windows pipeline at scale.
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