Microsoft Build

Microsoft Build was dominated by a single, explicit strategic pivot: Microsoft is building its own AI stack from the ground up, reducing its reliance on OpenAI and aiming directly at enterprise customers in the style of Anthropic. The company unveiled a new reasoning model, a dedicated agent platform, a new class of AI-first hardware, and a quantum computing breakthrough—all while conspicuously leaving Sam Altman and OpenAI out of the keynote for the first time in years.

Microsoft's Agent-First Transformation: Scout and Project Solara

The centerpiece of the conference was Microsoft's bet that AI agents, not apps, will define the next era of computing. The company unveiled Scout, an always-on enterprise AI agent built on the open-source OpenClaw framework. Scout appears as a contact in Microsoft Teams and can be assigned tasks like a human coworker. Omar Shahine, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Scout, described it as a personal assistant that works while you don't: "The whole point of having a personal assistant is that they're working when you're not working." In practice, Scout can block calendar time, generate talking points from recent messages, and even draft emails—though Shahine admitted his own Scout once sent "one big run-on sentence. No formatting." The agent is currently rolling out to a small group of customers and requires both a Frontier feature ac