Latest news with #Build2025
Time of India
2 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
When Vaniya Agrawal made Microsoft's AI security chief 'stumble' and accidentally reveal Walmart's AI plans
Former Microsoft employee Vaniya Agrawal , alongside colleague Hossam Nasr , disrupted a presentation by Microsoft's head of AI security Neta Haiby at the Build 2025 conference on Tuesday, causing an unexpected revelation of confidential internal messages about Walmart's artificial intelligence expansion plans. The leak occurred when Haiby switched screens amid the protests, accidentally exposing private Teams conversations about the retail giant's upcoming use of Microsoft's AI tools. The exposed messages showed Walmart is "ready to ROCK AND ROLL with Entra Web and AI Gateway," according to a Microsoft cloud solution architect. The conversation also quoted a Walmart AI engineer praising Microsoft's security capabilities, stating "Microsoft is WAY ahead of Google with AI security. We are excited to go down this path with you." The accidental revelation highlighted concerns about Walmart's existing "MyAssistant" tool, which the messages described as "overly powerful and needs guardrails." This proprietary AI system, built last summer using Azure OpenAI Service, helps store associates summarize documents and create marketing content. The Verge first reported on the incident and the AI partnership details. Protests disrupt multiple Microsoft Build sessions Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Switch to UnionBank Rewards Card UnionBank Credit Card Apply Now Undo This marked the third protest interruption at Microsoft Build 2025, as Agrawal and Nasr continued their campaign against Microsoft's cloud contracts with the Israeli government. The duo, representing the "No Azure for Apartheid" group, specifically chose Haiby's AI security session to voice their concerns. "Sarah, you are whitewashing the crimes of Microsoft in Palestine," Nasr shouted at Sarah Bird, Microsoft's head of responsible AI, who was co-hosting the session. The disruption followed similar protests during CEO Satya Nadella 's keynote and other Build presentations. Both Nasr and Agrawal are former Microsoft employees who were terminated after organizing Palestinian solidarity activities. Their protests centered on demanding Microsoft end its Azure contracts with Israeli military and government entities. Microsoft has not commented on the Build disruptions or the accidentally revealed Walmart partnership details.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Jefferies Names Microsoft (MSFT) Its Top AI Pick After 'Build 2025'
Jefferies' top tech analyst, Brent Thill, has named Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) his 'top AI pick' following the company's annual developer conference, Build 2025, held in Seattle last week. In a research note on May 23, Thill reaffirmed his Buy rating on the stock and maintained a price target of $550, highlighting Microsoft's strategic focus on artificial intelligence as a key driver of future growth. Asif Islam / Thill described Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) evolving into a comprehensive AI platform, positioning it to lead in the fast-moving AI landscape. He emphasized the company's growing momentum in AI services and infrastructure, noting a strong reception from the developer community. One of the standout themes from Build 2025 was Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, which Thill said had made meaningful progress over the past three to six months. Developers were particularly enthusiastic about its enhanced capabilities and the ease with which it can integrate next-generation reasoning models. Thill also noted that the updated Copilot now features advanced research tools, which he believes will help close the functionality gap with OpenAI's Deep Research, further strengthening Microsoft's competitive edge in enterprise AI solutions. With continued innovation and broad developer support, Microsoft remains a major force in shaping the future of artificial intelligence, according to Jefferies. While we acknowledge the potential of MSFT as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than MSFT and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about this . Read More: and Disclosure: None. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Express Tribune
4 days ago
- Business
- Express Tribune
Microsoft fires employee for protesting after tech giant admits it provided AI for Israel's ongoing onslaught in Gaza
Microsoft has dismissed an employee who interrupted CEO Satya Nadella's speech during the company's annual Build developer conference to protest its involvement in providing technology to the Israeli military. Joe Lopez, a software engineer at Microsoft, disrupted the event by shouting at Nadella during his keynote address. Lopez was swiftly escorted out of the room. Later, he sent a mass email to his colleagues challenging the company's assertions about its Azure cloud computing platform's use in Gaza. Microsoft employee Joe Lopez disrupted Satya Nadella's Build 2025 keynote accusing the company of aiding Israel's war on Gaza later emailing staff saying he won't stay silent as Microsoft backs what he called ethnic cleansing of Palestinians#Microsoft #Protest #CEO #Palestine — British Muslim TV (@BritishMuslimTV) May 20, 2025 Lopez's protest marks the first of several disruptions at the four-day conference, held at the Seattle Convention Center, which saw thousands of developers in attendance. Pro-Palestinian activists also interrupted multiple sessions, including those by other Microsoft executives. At one point, the company briefly muted the audio of a livestreamed talk. Outside the venue, protesters gathered to voice their concerns. Microsoft has a history of dismissing employees involved in protests against its business dealings with Israel. Earlier this year, the company fired individuals who had disrupted its 50th anniversary event over similar issues. The software giant confirmed last week that it had provided artificial intelligence (AI) services to the Israeli military during the ongoing war in Gaza. The protest comes amid heightened scrutiny of tech companies' involvement in military conflicts. Lopez's outburst was part of a broader wave of pro-Palestinian protests, with many calling for a boycott of companies they believe are complicit in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The advocacy group "No Azure for Apartheid," composed of current and former Microsoft employees, claims Lopez received a termination letter following the protest. However, they argue that Lopez could not access the letter. The group further alleges that Microsoft has blocked internal emails containing terms such as 'Palestine' and 'Gaza.'
India Today
4 days ago
- Business
- India Today
Microsoft fires employee who interrupted CEO Satya Nadella at Build to protest company's Israel business
Microsoft has fired the employee who disrupted CEO Satya Nadella's speech during the Microsoft Build 2025 event last week. The employee, Joe Lopez, who was a firmware engineer in Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure (AHSI), had interrupted Nadella's speech saying: 'Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians?' 'How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?' He was escorted out of the event immediately after this. advertisementLopez's pro-Palestine protest at the event was followed by a number of other disruptions at the Build 2025 event. According to a report by the Associated Press, at least three addresses during the event were disrupted by pro-Palestine protests. Reportedly, protesters also gathered outside the Build 2025 venue in Seattle. Soon after being escorted out of the event, Lopez also sent out a mass email to his colleagues explaining why he interrupted the event and disputing Microsoft's claims of how Azure is being used in Gaza. He says that as one of the 'largest companies in the world, Microsoft has immeasurable power to do the right thing'. He wrote that the company has the power to 'demand an end to this senseless tragedy'. 'I can no longer stand by in silence as Microsoft continues to facilitate Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,' Lopez wrote. advertisement'Microsoft openly admitted to allowing the Israel Ministry of Defence 'special access to our technologies beyond the terms of our commercial agreements'. Do you really believe that this 'special access' was allowed only once? What sort of 'special access' do they really need? And what are they doing with it,' Lopez added in the the email, Lopez also addressed Microsoft's recent blog post where the company claims that it conducted an internal audit which found 'no evidence to date that Microsoft's Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza'.Lopez said that Microsoft's statement 'falls far short of what we are demanding. Non-transparent audits into our cloud operations in Israel (conducted by no other than Microsoft itself and an unnamed external entity) that declare no wrongdoing by the company do not give me any sense of relief. In fact, this response has further compelled me to speak out'. 'We don't need an internal audit to know that a top Azure customer is committing crimes against humanity. We see it live on the internet every day,' his email disruption questioning Microsoft's work with Israel military wasn't the first instance that a company's employee has done a public protest. In April, Indian-origin Vaniya Agrawal interrupted Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates at the company's 50th anniversary celebration over the company's alleged involvement in Israel's war on Gaza. 'It is undeniable that Microsoft's Azure cloud offerings and AI developments form the technological backbone of Israel's automated apartheid and genocide systems,' she wrote in a a day before Agrawal's protest, another Microsoft engineer, Ibtihal Aboussad, had disrupted Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's speech at the Microsoft AI event saying, 'Mustafa, shame on you'.Both of them were fired. Last week, Microsoft reportedly quietly started filtering internal emails that contain words like 'Palestine,' 'Gaza,' and 'genocide,' to prevent any conversation around these topics being circulated on the company's Exchange servers.
Business Mayor
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Mayor
The battle to AI-enable the web: NLweb and what enterprises need to know
Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More In the first generation of the web, back in the late 1990s, search was okay but not great, and it wasn't easy to find things. That led to the rise of syndication protocols in the early 2000s, with Atom and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) providing a simplified way for website owners to make headlines and other content easily available and searchable. In the modern era of AI, a new group of protocols is emerging to serve the same basic purpose. This time, instead of making sites easier for humans to find, it's all about making websites easier for AI. Anthropic's Model Control Protocol (MCP), Google's Agent2Agent and large language models/ are among the existing efforts. The newest protocol is Microsoft's open-source NLWeb (natural language web) effort, which was announced during the Build 2025 conference. NLWeb is also directly linked to the first generation of web syndication standards, as it was conceived and created by RV Guha, who helped create RSS, RDF (Resource Description Framework) and NLWeb enables websites to easily add AI-powered conversational interfaces, effectively turning any website into an AI app where users can query content using natural language. NLWeb isn't necessarily about competing with other protocols; rather, it builds on top of them. The new protocol uses existing structured data formats like RSS, and each NLWeb instance functions as an MCP server. 'The idea behind NLWeb is it is a way for anyone who has a website or an API already to very easily make their website or their API an agentic application,' Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said during his Build 2025 keynote. 'You really can think about it a little bit like HTML for the agentic web.' NLWeb transforms websites into AI-powered experiences through a straightforward process that builds on existing web infrastructure while leveraging modern AI technologies. Building on existing data: The system begins by leveraging structured data that websites already publish, including markup, RSS feeds and other semi-structured formats that are commonly embedded in web pages. This means publishers don't need to rebuild their content infrastructure completely. Data processing and storage: NLWeb includes tools for adding this structured data to vector databases, which enable efficient semantic search and retrieval. The system supports all major vector database options, allowing developers to choose the solution that best fits their technical requirements and scale. Read More Building a 'virtual Vegas' in honor of CES AI enhancement layer: LLMs then enhance this stored data with external knowledge and context. For instance, when a user queries about restaurants, the system automatically layers on geographic insights, reviews and related information by combining the vectorized content with LLM capabilities to provide comprehensive, intelligent responses rather than simple data retrieval. Universal interface creation: The result is a natural language interface that serves both human users and AI agents. Visitors can ask questions in plain English and receive conversational responses, while AI systems can programmatically access and query the site's information through the MCP framework. This approach allows any website to participate in the emerging agentic web without requiring extensive technical overhauls. It makes AI-powered search and interaction as accessible as creating a basic webpage was in the early days of the internet. There are a lot of different protocols emerging in the AI space; not all do the same thing. Google's Agent2Agent , for example, is all about enabling agents to talk to each other. It's about orchestrating and communicating agentic AI and is not particularly focused on AI-enabling existing websites or AI content. Maria Gorskikh, founder and CEO of AIA and a contributor to the Project NANDA team at MIT, explained to VentureBeat that Google's A2A enables structured task passing between agents using defined schemas and lifecycle models. 'While the protocol is open-source and model-agnostic by design, its current implementations and tooling are closely tied to Google's Gemini stack — making it more of a backend orchestration framework than a general-purpose interface for web-based services,' she said. Another emerging effort is Its goal is to help LLMs better access web content. While on the surface, it might sound somewhat like NLWeb, it's not the same thing. 'NLWeb doesn't compete with it is more comparable to web scraping tools that try to deduce intent from a website,' Michael Ni, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research told VentureBeat. Krish Arvapally, co-founder and CTO of Dappier, explained to VentureBeat that provides a markdown-style format with training permissions that helps LLM crawlers ingest content appropriately. NLWeb focuses on enabling real-time interactions directly on a publisher's website. Dap pier has its own platform that automatically ingests RSS feeds and other structured data, then delivers branded, embeddable conversational interfaces. Publishers can syndicate their content to their data marketplace. MCP is the other big protocol, and it is increasingly becoming a de facto standard and a foundational element of NLWeb. Fundamentally, MCP is an open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources. Ni explained that in Microsoft's view, MCP is the transport layer, where, together, MCP and NLWeb provide the HTML and TCP/IP of the open agentic web. Forrester Senior Analyst Will McKeon-White sees a number of advantages for NLWeb over other options. 'The main advantage of NLWeb is better control over how AI systems 'see' the pieces that make up websites, allowing for better navigation and more complete understanding of the tooling,' McKeon-White told VentureBeat. 'This could reduce both errors from systems misunderstanding what they're seeing on websites, as well as reduce interface rework.' Microsoft didn't just throw NLWeb over the proverbial wall and hope someone would use it. Microsoft already has multiple organizations engaged and using NLWeb, including Chicago Public Media, Allrecipes, Eventbrite, Hearst (Delish), O'Reilly Media, Tripadvisor and Shopify. Andrew Odewahn, Chief Technology Officer at O'Reilly Media is among the early adopters and sees real promise for NLWeb. 'NLWeb leverages the best practices and standards developed over the past decade on the open web and makes them available to LLMs,' Odewahn told VentureBeat. 'Companies have long spent time optimizing this kind of metadata for SEO and other marketing purposes, but now they can take advantage of this wealth of data to make their own internal AI smarter and more capable with NLWeb.' In his view, NLWeb is valuable for enterprises both as consumers of public information and publishers of private information. He noted that nearly every company has sales and marketing efforts where they might need to ask, 'What does this company do?' or 'What is this product about?' 'NLWeb provides a great way to open this information to your internal LLMs so that you don't have to go hunting and pecking to find it,' Odewahn said. 'As a publisher, you can add your own metadata using standard and use NLWeb internally as an MCP server to make it available for internal use.' Using NLWeb isn't necessarily a heavy lift, either. Odewahn noted that many organizations are probably already using many of the standards NLWeb relies on. 'There's no downside in trying it out now since NLWeb can run entirely within your infrastructure,' he said. 'It's open source software meeting the best in open source data, so you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain from trying it now.' Constellation Research Analyst Michael Ni has a somewhat positive viewpoint on NLWeb. However, that doesn't mean enterprises need to adopt it immediately. Ni noted that NLWeb is in the very early stages of maturity and enterprises should expect 2-3 years for any substantial adoption. He suggests that leading-edge companies with specific needs, such as active marketplaces, can look to pilot with the ability to engage and help shape the standard. 'It's a visionary specification with clear potential, but it needs ecosystem validation, implementation tooling, and reference integrations before it can reach mainstream enterprise pilots,' Ni said. Others have a somewhat more aggressive viewpoint on adoption. Gorskikh suggests taking an accelerated approach to ensure your enterprise doesn't fall behind. 'If you're an enterprise with a large content surface, internal knowledge base, or structured data, piloting NLWeb now is a smart and necessary step to stay ahead,' she said. 'This isn't a wait-and-see moment — it's more like the early adoption of APIs or mobile apps.' That said, she noted that regulated industries need to tread carefully. Sectors like insurance, banking and healthcare should hold off on production use until there's a neutral, decentralized verification and discovery system in place. There are already early-stage efforts addressing this — such as the NANDA project at MIT that Gorskikh participates in, which is building an open, decentralized registry and reputation system for agentic services. For enterprise AI leaders, NLWeb is a watershed moment and a technology that should not be ignored. AI is going to interact with your site, and you need to AI enable it. NLWeb is one way that will be particularly attractive to publishers, much like RSS became a must-have for all websites in the early 2000s. In a few years, users will just expect it to be there; they will expect to be able to search and find things, while agentic AI systems will need to be able to access the content as well. That's the promise of NLWeb.
