20-May-2025 :

Microsoft has kicked off Build 2025 with a sweeping set of announcements centered on the idea of an 'open agentic web'—a framework where autonomous agents work seamlessly across platforms, browsers, and development environments.
Among the highlights: GitHub Copilot has been upgraded from a passive in-editor assistant to a proactive, asynchronous coding agent. Developers can now access Copilot Chat as an open-source plugin for Visual Studio Code, enhancing collaboration across repositories and projects.
Microsoft also launched Magentic-UI, an open-source prototype agent focused on human-in-the-loop collaboration and fine-grained control over web tasks. In parallel, it added Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini—models from Elon Musk’s xAI—into the Azure AI Foundry platform, giving developers access to over 1,900 models to choose from.
A new initiative called NLWeb aims to bring conversational UI to websites using an HTML-like standard. The goal is to make building voice/chat-enabled apps as easy as building static web pages.
Copilot also expands with new tuning features that allow organizations to customize models on internal data, and introduces multi-agent orchestration for handling complex workflows involving multiple agents communicating in tandem.
While expectations for the 'Year of the AI Agent' are still in early realization stages, these releases demonstrate Microsoft’s clear intent to lead in the agentic platform space. The company’s push toward open source and standardization, as seen in NLWeb and Copilot Chat, marks a pivotal move in building a distributed AI-first web ecosystem.