Microsoft Build 2025: Everything new announced for Windows, web, and more

At Build 2025, Microsoft unveiled a range of updates across its products, hinting at how AI will soon reshape user experiences in apps, websites, and Windows

Microsoft hosted its annual developers conference, Build 2025, on May 19, introducing artificial intelligence-powered updates across Microsoft's product ecosystem. While many of the updates are aimed at developers, several announcements from Build 2025 point to an AI-infused future that will soon affect how consumers work with familiar Microsoft services and navigate the internet.

 

Here’s what consumers should take away from the wave of announcements made at Build 2025:

Microsoft Build 2025: New announcements

Microsoft 365 with personalised AI

New abilities in Microsoft 365 will allow organisations to customise their AI-powered Copilots using internal data and workflows. This means that companies can train AI assistants to draft documents, summarise meetings, or automate emails in ways that reflect their specific communication styles, processes, and domain knowledge.

 

  Additionally, Microsoft introduced multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio—a feature that allows multiple AI agents to work together on complex tasks. For end users, this translates to more cohesive help across different Microsoft apps like Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, enabling smoother collaboration and automation behind the scenes.

AI-infused web experience

Clicking through menus may become a thing of the past. Microsoft introduced a new open standard called NLWeb, which lets websites communicate with AI in natural language. That means instead of navigating through forms and drop-downs, users might just ask a site, “Can I return my last order?” and get a response immediately.

 

This is made possible by Microsoft’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—an open standard first introduced by Anthropic. MCP is designed to let AI agents interact across apps and services more seamlessly.

New Windows AI Foundry and updated Azure AI Foundry

A major reveal was the introduction of the Windows AI Foundry, a new toolkit designed to help developers build and run AI models on Windows devices or hybrid cloud environments. It supports open-source frameworks and custom models, enabling local AI abilities like intelligent assistants and image recognition—without always relying on the cloud.

 

  Meanwhile, Azure AI Foundry received significant upgrades, including tools for model selection and evaluation, a new Agent Service, and Agent ID, which assigns unique identities to AI agents. Another major addition to Azure AI Foundry is the inclusion of Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini models from xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company.

Agentic AI capabilities for GitHub Copilot

Microsoft is evolving GitHub Copilot from a real-time coding assistant into a more autonomous AI agent that can handle coding tasks asynchronously. Instead of just giving coders suggestions in the code editor, this new version of Copilot is integrated into the GitHub platform and works on their behalf. That means it can perform coding tasks in the background, even when the user is not actively typing in codes.

Microsoft Discovery

Among the announcements was the launch of Microsoft Discovery, a new platform aimed at researchers and scientists. The platform uses AI agents to assist with complex discovery processes, from analysing data to generating hypotheses. Microsoft envisions this technology speeding up breakthroughs in areas such as drug development, materials science, and climate research.