Microsoft Build 2026: Be yourself at work
Platforms shift when developers build. We explore, choose tools, dream, create. This platform shift comes with more information than ever, ready at your fingertips. This shift, it’s about building fast AND THEN: it’s about building, operating, optimizing and observing. Securing your infrastructure, applications and agents in a seamless way that doesn’t slow you down from the moment you open your laptop to the moment you ship to production. But there’s a duality in being a developer – you’re a tinkerer, choosing your own tools and models, and you’re an enterprise builder, shipping systems that demand governance, security and trust from day one. Developers don’t need another way to just build and run an agent or app. They need trust. They need native context and knowledge. Most of all, they need choice to access the right model for the right problem. This duality is where Microsoft thrives. We ask: what does it mean to be a modern developer today? And at Microsoft Build, we shared how we empower developers to build in this era of ubiquitous intelligence with the controls and security you expect at scale – on a platform that’s model diverse, open and heterogeneous at every layer of the stack. Bringing together what you know with what the world knows natively. There’s a lot of news today, but there are three themes to anchor on. First, intelligence that’s truly yours. With the Microsoft Agent Platform powered by your context and intelligence from Microsoft IQ, you can build your agent in GitHub, deploy it to Microsoft Foundry and optimize it automatically with models best suited for the job. Ground it in your intelligence and the world’s knowledge, then access it via Microsoft Teams, M365 or anywhere your team works. Designed to reduce the need to make tradeoffs between context and governance, security and speed, or models and tools. Second, the full stack built your way. You should be able to build the way you want to build, with the tools, models and workflows you choose, and make it real. This expands beyond the agent platform to across the stack. Silicon to OS to developer tools to cloud – and that starts with Windows. Not Windows for “Windows developers.” Windows for developers, period. We’re bringing a new developer configuration that gives you more flexibility, a frictionless intelligent shell and terminal experience, local sandboxing for agents, new Windows Subsystem for Linux capabilities and powerful options to do it on your local machine. Third is what comes next, where agentic systems move from code to human progress, amplifying what scientists and researchers can achieve. New frontiers in science and computing that start with the same developer platform underneath. Together, developers get a multi-model ecosystem, from your laptop to the cloud, so you can build the frontier without giving up the control and craft that truly makes the work yours. And as always, it starts with the developer. Let’s dive in. Agents that know you, your business, and the world As models become more capable and more available, the differentiator for any organization is no longer access to intelligence, but ownership. How does your expertise, data and way of working become a system that continuously learns and drives better outcomes? The goal is an ecosystem that gives companies their own agency, not one that funnels value back to a consultant or the model maker. Your agents should reflect how you think and operate, from your business logic and institutional knowledge, down to your workflows. That starts with context. Microsoft IQ, generally available today across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio, is a new context layer that grounds agents in both world knowledge and enterprise knowledge. Work IQ is the workplace intelligence layer for agents, capturing how work actually happens across Microsoft 365, organizational systems and external sources: people, emails, documents, meetings and how they connect. The Work IQ APIs, generally available on June 16, provide programmatic access to this intelligence layer and give agents the context they need to work effectively in your organization. Fabric IQ provides a shared semantic foundation over structured business data. Foundry IQ ties it together and enables retrieval planning across both enterprise knowledge and the live web. New to the family is Web IQ, announced today: the fastest real-world grounding you can give your agents. An AI-first web search stack that’s model-agnostic and MCP-native, returning relevant passages at nearly 2.5x the speed of the next best alternative. We’re also looking at how this context applies to new form factors, specifically always-on autonomous agents. Microsoft Scout is a new personal agent for work that we are bringing to Frontier customers today. Built on OpenClaw and WorkIQ, Microsoft Scout understands how you work, uses the tools you already live in, like Teams and Outlook, and proactively handles things like meeting prep, scheduling conflicts and routine tasks without asking. We’re excited to share more soon as we expand what Microsoft Scout can do and roll it out more broadly. On the model layer, the Microsoft AI Superintelligence Team released a family of seven new in-house models, starting with MAI-Thinking-1 – Microsoft AI’s first reasoning model. Trained from scratch with zero distillation on enterprise grade, clean and commercially licensed data you can build on with confidence. It’s a mid-sized, 35 billion active parameter model with a 256K context window built for high efficiency and performance, but importantly, at a low-token cost. On a blind test, independent raters prefer it to Sonnet 4.6 [1], and it matches Opus 4.6 on coding abilities on SWE Bench Pro [2]. MAI-Thinking-1 was designed to be good at complex multi-step instructions, long-context reasoning and code generation, and it’s open now on Foundry in private preview. But that isn’t the only new model. MAI-Image-2.5 and its flash variant are Microsoft’s first models to serve both text-to-image (#3 on the Arena AI leaderboard) and enabling image-to-image workloads (#2 on the Arena AI leaderboard, surpassing Nano Banana 2). These are especially useful in creative workflows, when you want some






