AI: Microsoft puts its best foot forward for AI Developers. RTZ #726

It’s a week of tech company Developer focused conferences. Yesterday we discussed Nvidia’s keynote and conference at Computex in Taiwan. Today saw Microsoft with its Build 2025 event. Also this week, Google kicks off its I/O 2025 with an expected focus on its Gemini AI.

And next month we have the big one, Apple’s WWDC 2025. All of them are of course focused on their progress with AI in this AI Tech Wave, accelerating their research and commercial efforts as fast as possible.

In today’s post, I’d like to focus on Microsoft’s Build conference, with CEO Satya Nadella kicking it off with a keynote. Especially since they’re still a core partner of OpenAI, despite recent shifts in aligned interests. Microsoft had a lot on their AI plate for this week. Lots of announcements of note. Including Elon Musk’s recently merged X/xAI LLM Grok being hosted on Microsoft Azure.

Axios has a useful broader overview in “Microsoft’s need for AI speed”:

“In leading Microsoft’s core AI work, Jay Parikh says he has a clear mission: To make sure the company develops, ships and improves products faster than Google and other rivals.”

“Why it matters: Despite its early partnership with OpenAI, critics say Microsoft hasn’t fully seized the AI moment.”

“It’s all about speed,” Parikh told Axios. “The thing for us is just, ‘How do we learn faster than any of the other folks out there?'”

Parikh (no relation), is a key new addition to Microsoft’s AI efforts:

• “Parikh, a former top engineering executive at Meta, was hired by Satya Nadella last year. But it wasn’t until January that Microsoft announced his role, leading a new engineering team responsible for AI work across the company.”

• “That includes the technology that goes into Microsoft’s own consumer and business products as well as the capabilities that get built into Windows and Azure for other software developers to use.”

As mentioned earlier, there’s a plethora of AI conferences focused on Developers worldwide:

• “The company is showing its latest AI efforts at its Build developer conference on Monday and Tuesday in Seattle.”

• “Meanwhile Google, is expected to show new AI models and tools at its I/O developer conference Tuesday and Wednesday in Mountain View.”

• “In addition, SAP is holding its Sapphire conference in Orlando this week, and Anthropic holds its first-ever developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday.”

“AI will be the focus of all of these events, with much of the talk this year shifting to how businesses can let AI work as an autonomous colleague rather than always needing supervision by a human.”

And the current white hot area is AI Coding, where OpenAI just bought AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion.

• “In coding, for example, Parikh said the approach is shifting from having the AI just help complete the code that a human programmer is writing to having the AI take on programming tasks on its own.”

• “You’ll see demos of this as we get into Build, but I can assign it an entire issue or a task and it can just go off and build stuff, fix stuff, secure stuff, triage stuff, coordinate with other agents if it needs to,” Parikh said.”

• “That’s a broader shift happening across the industry. Late last week, OpenAI introduced Codex, its own take on a coding agent that can work asynchronously on programming tasks.”

Parikh has a lot to manage at Microsoft:

“Between the lines: Outsiders often struggle when joining Microsoft to figure out how to do what they want in an organization as vast and siloed as Microsoft is.”

• “With AI being such a focus for Microsoft, Parikh is unlikely to lack for resources.”

• “But the company has a lot of teams — including all of its various product teams, each of which has its own AI agenda, as well as a consumer AI effort being led by Mustafa Suleyman.”

“Parikh said he has spent most of his time since joining Microsoft talking to people to learn the company’s ways.”

Also notable was Microsoft’s support for emerging new AI interoperability ‘model context protocol’, (MCP), which I discussed a few days ago:

“Supporting Model Context Protocol (MCP): Microsoft is delivering broad first-party support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) across its agent platform and frameworks, spanning 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 advance secure, at-scale adoption of the open protocol and announced two new contributions to the MCP ecosystem, an updated authorization specification, which enables people to use their existing trusted sign-in methods to give agents and LLM-powered apps access to data and services such as personal storage drives or subscription services, and the design of an MCP server registry service, which allows anyone to implement public or private, up-to-date, centralized repositories for MCP server entries.”

Microsoft is laser focused on accelerating AI adoption via its #2 Cloud service Azure, and its global set of enterprise customers. And it remains a key leader ithis AI Tech Wave on that front. Google, Amazon and others of course are also keenly focused on doing the same. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)