Microsoft (MSFT) sees a future when artificial intelligence agents will be essential for several activities, from managing the Windows operating system to coding. Monday’s Microsoft Build 2025 conference in Seattle saw participants share this ambitious vision. The technological behemoth stated its expectation for the emergence of what it calls an ‘open agentic web,’ a structure wherein artificial intelligence agents are able to perform tasks or make judgments on behalf of single consumers or whole businesses.
Among the most important trends in technology are Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, either semi-autonomous or fully autonomous AI software modules meant to help people with certain activities. These responsibilities might range widely, including obtaining tickets for concerts or moving data between apps. Moreover, certain of these agents may interact with one another to create a network of agents able to handle more complex tasks.
Microsoft Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, said, “What we are seeing is AI development accelerating and people going from kind of proof of concepts to working solutions that are driving business impact.”
Particularly with the advent of what is called the agentic web, the expectation is for momentum to continue and perhaps even grow. Guthrie further added that the main aim of Microsoft is to help companies, developers, and startups keep current with the fast technical changes. Microsoft estimates that around 230,000 companies are presently using Copilot Studio to create custom artificial intelligence agents; predictions indicate that by 2028, businesses will have deployed 1.3 billion agents.
Among the numerous AI agent applications shown at its recent event were the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit, developed to help developers in creating agents for Microsoft 365, the GitHub Copilot AI agent meant to support developers in coding, and the ability for AI agents to directly interact with native Windows applications.
