Every year at their annual developer conference, Microsoft announces a huge array of new features and services, but as the year progresses very little seems to have a major impact. It remains to be seen if this year will be any different. The announcements this week were certainly ambitious, but their track record makes us healthily sceptical.
The most significant software announcement has some promise. Microsoft has opened up "Work IQ" APIs, making the intelligence layer behind Microsoft 365 available to any external developer building agents. It means third-party agents can now tap into the kind of organisational memory that made Copilot attractive in theory. There will hopefully be more to come, our initial tests saw a few gaps and incompatibilities. Let's hope they stay the course and eventually offer the rich context layer that they are so well positioned to deliver.
“With Work IQ, we have exposed what is perhaps the most important database in a company that never got used as a database because it was only captive to our apps.”
Scout is the first of a new category Microsoft is calling Autopilots: always-on background agents built on the OpenClaw framework, with their own persistent identity and memory. Scout connects to Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint and is designed to handle preparation work, meeting briefings, expense reports, follow-ups, without being explicitly invoked. It is currently in preview for Frontier programme subscribers only, which means anyone not already paying for GitHub Copilot at the higher tier will not see it for some time.
Microsoft also announced seven new MAI models, including MAI-Thinking-1, its first in-house reasoning model. At 35 billion active parameters (around a trillion in total, in a sparse mixture-of-experts design) with a 256k token context window, it targets multi-step reasoning and code generation, and Microsoft claims it scores among the strongest in its class. The broader MAI family covers image generation, voice, transcription, and coding. This is Microsoft reducing its dependency on OpenAI, which has been a clear strategic direction since late 2024 but is now being formalised.
Microsoft's open-source announcements were probably the most immediately interesting. ASSERT, short for Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing takes plain-text descriptions of how an agent should behave and turns them into executable test suites automatically. The four-stage pipeline, covering systematisation, taxonomisation, test generation, and inference scoring, produces scored results with policy citations and failure rationales, without requiring a developer to write individual test cases by hand. The Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT) is the runtime enforcement layer for controlling agents. It is a seven-package middleware system that intercepts every tool call, resource access, and inter-agent message before it executes, evaluating it against a policy engine in under 0.1 milliseconds. Policies are defined in YAML, OPA Rego, or Cedar, making them versionable, reviewable, and auditable by compliance teams rather than buried in prompt instructions.
CEO Satya Nadella's framing is not that Microsoft has the best models or the most popular products. It is that every company should be able to build its own frontier intelligence, with its own private evals, its own traces, its own harness, and its own compounding advantage. The goal for Microsoft is to deliver a platform that makes that possible for any organisation, regardless of starting point. On the No Priors podcast Nadella admitted that the industry, including Microsoft, badly underestimated the real-world complexity of deploying AI in ways that actually deliver business value.
But Microsoft's stock has declined while competitors have risen. Copilot adoption remains weak. Anthropic has taken the lead in coding tools and Microsoft's response, pulling Claude Code licences and pushing developers toward Copilot, was not warmly received. GitHub, one of Microsoft's most important developer assets, has suffered serious outages, with bot traffic overwhelming infrastructure in ways that have pushed some long-standing users to reconsider their commitment.
Whether the execution matches the architecture is a separate matter, and Build has a long history of answering that question badly.
Takeaways: The most useful things Microsoft announced at Build 2026 are not the headline products. They are the components. Enterprises building agent systems do not want to be locked into a single vendor's stack, and the platform that wins will be the one that provides the interoperability layer, the identity controls, the policy enforcement, and the eval infrastructure. Copilot Cowork + Scout point in an interesting direction, with genuine ambition around always-on, background intelligence that learns how a specific organisation works. But both are restricted in access, incomplete in capability, and untested at production scale. Microsoft is moving faster to translate concepts into something resembling a coherent system than it has in recent years. Whether they can execute is a question that the Build conference cannot answer.