Build 2026 Briefing

Unveiled at Build, Scout is an always-on personal agent that works in the background under its own identity on a schedule you set, rather than waiting to be prompted. Built on the OpenClaw architecture and integrated with Microsoft 365, it spans cloud, desktop and web — connecting to Teams, Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint plus chats, email and calendar, with policy conformance through Agent 365. Available to a limited set of Frontier customers as an early experimental release.

Microsoft's agentic system for complex, long-running, multi-tool work went GA worldwide on June 16. You delegate an outcome and Cowork plans, executes and revises across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint — running in a secure cloud environment so tasks continue even when your device is off. Off by default (admin-enabled), billed per use in Copilot Credits, with model choice (Anthropic's Opus, OpenAI's GPT) and partner plugins like Miro, Harvey and monday.com. Requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.

Announced at Build for GA on June 16, the Work IQ APIs let developers build agents on the same intelligence layer that powers Copilot. Four domains map how agents work — Chat (Copilot responses with citations), Context (agent-ready source data), Tools (actions like sending mail or scheduling) and Workspaces (secure state and memory inside the tenant boundary). Consumption-based pricing in Copilot Credits, with a new cost-management dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

A new grounding system that joins Microsoft's IQ platform alongside Work IQ, extending web-scale retrieval so agents can reason over open-web knowledge in addition to enterprise and business context — giving agents the right information at the right time, wherever it lives.

A wave of updates to move agents from demo to production — Hosted Agents, Toolboxes, Memory, tracing, evaluations, an Agent Optimizer and governance improvements. Foundry is positioning itself as the runtime layer where agents are deployed, observed and governed at scale.

Brings unified knowledge and serverless retrieval into Foundry so teams can build higher-quality agents faster, with grounding that improves response quality — no separate retrieval infrastructure to stand up.

Mustafa Suleyman unveiled seven new models in Microsoft's MAI family, expanding the range of sizes and capabilities available in the platform — part of the "hill-climbing machine" approach to building Microsoft's own models.

Microsoft Discovery — the enterprise agentic platform for the full scientific workflow, used by BHP, Syensqo and GSK — reached general availability, combining AI, simulation and high-performance computing for R&D. A free Discovery local app also launched in preview, requiring only a GitHub Copilot account.

A new desktop app for directing multiple agents in parallel from a single "My Work" view across sessions, issues, PRs and background automations. Parallel agents run in isolated git worktrees; "Canvases" are live, editable work surfaces; cloud and local sandboxes bound agent execution; and Agent Merge carries PRs through review, CI and merge. The Copilot SDK is also now GA across Node/TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET, Rust and Java. In technical preview for Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business and Enterprise.

Microsoft's latest small-tier coding model and the first of a new wave purpose-built and tuned for GitHub Copilot. It delivers strong quality for its size on lightweight coding workflows and is selectable from the model picker in VS Code. Rolling out across Copilot Free, Student, Pro, Pro+ and Max, starting limited and expanding gradually.

What's coming next in VS — deeper GitHub Copilot agent participation in debugging, profiling and testing; pre-build checks to catch errors before failed builds; AI-assisted merge-conflict resolution; expanded modernization (Web Forms to Blazor, adding Aspire to existing apps); auto-applied Microsoft-authored skills; and BYOK/BYOM so teams can use local or cloud models that match cost and compliance needs.

Headlined by union types finally landing in C#, plus agentic-web building blocks in ASP.NET Core and Blazor (closely integrated with Aspire), on-device AI with .NET MAUI, and dotnetup — a new cross-platform installer for the .NET SDK and runtime. Available in preview.

Production patterns became first-class via Agent Harness (context compaction, instruction merging, todo tracking); Foundry Hosted Agents added a path from local dev to managed hosting; CodeAct (via Hyperlight) collapses many tool calls into fewer model turns; and GitHub Copilot SDK integration plus multi-agent Handoff orchestration reached 1.0 for .NET and Python. Open specs ACS and ASSERT round out runtime governance and evaluation.

Linux-like command-line utilities that run natively on Windows, reducing setup friction for cross-platform developers working across both environments.

Structured skills for agentic native-app development with WinUI 3 and the WinApp CLI, letting agents build native Windows apps end-to-end more efficiently.

Powered by WinGet for one-command setup of a developer-ready Windows 11 environment, getting new machines productive in a single step.

WSL containers are coming to public preview with built-in CLI and API support for Linux container workflows on Windows, while Intelligent Terminal enters experimental preview to add context-aware agent support directly in terminal workflows.

A new policy-driven containment layer that enforces what an agent can access at runtime. Demoed running the open-source OpenClaw agent framework securely on Windows, using the same isolation model adopted by the GitHub Copilot CLI.

A developer-focused device built on NVIDIA RTX Spark silicon — roughly 1 petaflop of AI compute and 128 GB unified memory for running models locally. Available later this year.

An enterprise-ready PostgreSQL service engineered for AI workloads, aimed at giving agentic apps a scalable, managed relational data tier.

Fabric Data Warehouse can now run eligible queries directly on NVIDIA accelerated computing inside the execution engine — enable it in workspace settings and the optimizer pushes work to the GPU when that's the better plan, with no rewrites or cluster sizing. Internal benchmarking in May showed up to 7x faster runs than three other major cloud warehouses; the underlying CoddSpeed research won Best Industry Paper at SIGMOD 2026.

Microsoft detailed its data-plus-AI platform direction for building scalable agentic applications on Microsoft Fabric and its broader database portfolio.

An open-source SDK and CLI for building enterprise-grade, production application backends managed from Microsoft Fabric.

New memory and retrieval tooling for Azure Cosmos DB, giving agentic application patterns concrete building blocks for storing and recalling context.