Microsoft has opened its Microsoft Build 2025 developer conference by focusing on artificial intelligence, specifically AI agents. The company states that the future lies in developing an open agentic network, in which AI agents can make decisions and execute tasks autonomously on behalf of users and organizations. AI agents are systems capable of perceiving and understanding their environment so they can process information, make decisions, and act autonomously to complete tasks previously assigned by the user. Microsoft's goal is to enable these agents to operate in individual, organizational, team, and business contexts, all within an open network that allows these systems to interact with different websites and applications to carry out their tasks. This is how Microsoft is laying the groundwork for an open agentic network. "At Microsoft Build, we are showcasing the steps we are taking to make this vision a reality through our platforms, products, and infrastructure. We are offering new programming models and agents to developers; introducing enterprise agents; and we are also introducing new tools for developers to create and implement ... We're making our platforms like Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and Windows the best places to build; embracing open protocols; and accelerating scientific discoveries with AI. All so developers and organizations can focus on bringing the next big revolution to life," the company explains in a statement. To advance this future vision, Microsoft is promoting shared infrastructures and open protocols. Notable among these measures is the fact that Microsoft offers broad support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that facilitates secure interaction between AI agents and applications, on platforms such as GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, and Windows 11. In addition, Microsoft and GitHub have joined the MCP Steering Committee to help promote wide-scale adoption of the open protocol. In addition, two new contributions to the MCP ecosystem have been announced: "an updated authorization specification, allowing people to use their existing trusted login methods to grant agents and LLM-powered applications access to data and services such as personal storage drives or subscription services; and the design of an MCP Server Registry Service, allowing anyone to deploy centralized, up-to-date, public or private repositories for MCP server entries." Separately, Microsoft has unveiled NLWeb, an open-source project that would function as the HTML of the agentic web. NLWeb allows websites to offer conversational interfaces linked to AI models of their choice and their own data, facilitating semantic and direct interaction with the content. "Each NLWeb endpoint is also an MCP server, so websites can make their content easily discoverable and accessible to AI agents if they choose." Other Microsoft AI Updates In addition, the tech giant also unveiled numerous new features during the first day of the Microsoft Build 2025 event. These are some of the highlights: New GitHub Copilot programming agent and updates to GitHub Models Introduction of Windows AI Foundry Azure AI Foundry models and new tools for model evaluation Introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning and multi-agent orchestration Microsoft Enters Agent ID in preview Introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning and multi-agent orchestration Launch of Microsoft Discovery Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini available through the Azure AI Foundry platform