19–22 May 2025, Seattle (hybrid, four days). The first Build stretched to four days. The framing was clean: 2024 was the year of the assistant; 2025 is the year of the agent.
What we took away
- GitHub Copilot Coding Agent. An asynchronous, autonomous coding agent embedded directly in GitHub, accessible from VS Code. Analyses entire repos, makes cross-file edits, generates and runs tests, fixes bugs, proposes terminal commands. Available the day of the keynote.
- Copilot Agent Mode everywhere. Visual Studio, VS Code, JetBrains, Eclipse, Xcode. Multi-model support (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) as a first-class option.
- Azure AI Foundry — Microsoft's unified AI app platform, now hosting 10,000+ models including Grok 3 / Grok 3 Mini, with Hugging Face and Meta integrations.
- NLWeb — open-source project for embedding natural-language AI interfaces on any website with minimal code. Microsoft pitched it as "HTML for the agentic web."
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) adopted across Windows, Azure, GitHub, and Copilot Studio as the standard for tool/agent interop. Windows becomes a first-class MCP host.
- Windows AI Foundry for on-device AI app development.
Why it mattered for us
MCP becoming a real standard is the single most useful thing for our customer work. Until 2025 every agent integration was a one-off; now we can integrate Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and our own customer agents through the same protocol with the same auth model.
"The current shift is building out the open agentic web at scale in 2025. The industry is moving from few apps with vertically integrated stacks to an open, scalable, agentic web platform." — Satya Nadella, Build 2025 keynote.
We're betting on that thesis.
Microsoft Build
GitHub Copilot
MCP
Azure AI Foundry