Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
At Build 2026, Microsoft’s flagship developer conference, CEO Satya Nadella made a bold prediction. He said the age of operating systems and apps is over, and that future belongs to AI agents. Suffice to say, AI or artificial intelligence — and by extension AI agents — was at the centre of Microsoft Build 2026 keynote event. The company basically threw everything but the kitchen sink at the attendees and the rest of the world watching online, as senior executives took stage one by one to make a flurry of announcements around how Microsoft is ushering into the future that Nadella has so boldly predicted.
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Among the dozens of announcements made at Build 2026, five stood out as key pillars of Microsoft’s evolving AI strategy including:
– Project Solara: a new platform designed for AI-first devices.
– Microsoft Scout: its next-generation AI assistant on the lines of OpenClaw
– The MAI family of in-house AI reasoning models
– A suite of AI-focused developer tools led by the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box
– The Majorana 2 quantum chip and Microsoft Discovery
All of these announcements were part of the company’s broader vision for the future of AI. Microsoft believes that as building AI applications becomes easier, the next challenge will be creating systems that are secure, scalable and capable of operating seamlessly across devices, operating systems and the cloud.
Let’s take a closer look.
1. Project Solara
The biggest highlights of announcements was Project Solara, a new chip-to-cloud platform designed specifically for AI agents. Microsoft says it is designed to make it easier and cheaper for companies to create AI-powered devices and products that can be customised for different customers, industries and use cases.
To show what Project Solara could enable, Microsoft demonstrated two prototype devices. The first was a wearable badge powered by Qualcomm technology, designed to let users interact with AI agents hands-free while moving between meetings or travelling. The second was a desk companion powered by a MediaTek chip, which acts as an always-available AI assistant that can stay aware of a user’s work, schedule and ongoing tasks.
Microsoft said Solara is designed for a future where agents are not tied to a single app, device or screen, but can operate seamlessly across different environments.
2. Microsoft Scout
Another major announcement was Microsoft Scout, which the company describes as its first Autopilot agent for work. Built on open-source OpenClaw technology and powered by Microsoft’s Work IQ context engine, Scout is designed to operate across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint while also performing actions directly on a user’s device.
Unlike traditional AI assistants that rely on users constantly entering prompts, Micrsoft has designed Scout to work in the background and proactively help with day-to-day tasks. Microsoft says it can keep track of projects, manage scheduling conflicts, prepare meeting briefs and handle routine workplace activities on a user’s behalf.
Microsoft also highlighted the security and management features built into Scout. Each AI agent is assigned its own Entra identity, allowing organisations to monitor what it can access and control the actions it is allowed to perform. For now, Scout is being rolled out on an experimental basis to selected Frontier organisations in the United States.
3. MAI-Thinking-1
Microsoft also used Build 2026 to showcase the next generation of its internally developed AI models. The headline launch was MAI-Thinking-1, a 35-billion-parameter reasoning model designed for long-context reasoning, multi-step instructions and code generation.
According to Microsoft, the model was built from the ground up using enterprise-grade and commercially licensed data, rather than relying on outputs generated by other leading AI models. The company says this approach helped in improving efficiency while also reducing operating costs.
Alongside MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft expanded its broader MAI model family with image, voice, transcription and coding models, including MAI-Image-2.5, MAI-Voice-2, MAI-Transcribe-1.5 and MAI-Code-1.
4. Surface RTX Spark Dev Box
On the hardware side, Microsoft introduced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a compact desktop system powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark silicon. The machine is said to deliver up to one petaflop of AI performance and comes with up to 128GB of unified memory.
Microsoft says the device can run AI models with up to 120 billion parameters locally, making it well suited for tasks such as model fine-tuning, agentic AI workflows and other demanding development workloads without relying entirely on the cloud.
The company also announced a series of Windows 11 updates for developers, including expanded Windows AI APIs, Windows Development Configurations, Linux-inspired Coreutils, WSL containers, an Intelligent Terminal and support for OpenClaw on Windows. Together, these tools are designed to make Windows a stronger platform for AI development.
5. Majorana 2 and Microsoft Discovery
Microsoft also unveiled Majorana 2, its latest quantum computing chip. The company claims the new processor delivers a 1,000-fold improvement in reliability compared with Majorana 1 and provides foundation towards its aim of building a scalable quantum computer by 2029, significantly accelerating its earlier timeline.
Alongside the chip, Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, an AI-powered scientific research platform designed to help organisations carry out evidence-based research more efficiently. The platform combines AI agents with human expertise to explore scientific questions, analyse data and accelerate discoveries across a range of industries.
Microsoft reveals that companies including BHP, Syensqo and GSK are already using the platform, while a local version of the Microsoft Discovery application is currently available in preview.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
