Microsoft Build Live Updates: Ceo Satya Nadella Announces Copilot And Other Ai News At Annual Developer Conference
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is expected to detail the team's AI advancements, including Copilot updates, at the Build keynote on Tuesday.
Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images
- Microsoft's Build keynote kicked off at 12 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
- CEO Satya Nadella gave updates on Microsoft's generative AI products, like Copilot.
- Microsoft leaned further into its AI agent Copilot with new Copilot+ PCs announced on Monday.
OpenAI and Google may have held the AI spotlight last week, but now it's Microsoft's turn.
The annual Microsoft Build developer conference keynote kicked off at 12 p.m. ET on Tuesday, and CEO Satya Nadella unveiled Microsoft's latest generative AI offerings, including Copilot updates.
Copilot was the dominant theme today, as it was on Monday when Microsoft held a press event and unveiled its new Copilot+ PC lineup, starting with the AI-infused Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. Focusing on hardware yesterday gave the company plenty of airtime to focus on AI software and features during Tuesday's keynote.
Copilot, the AI assistant tightly integrated with the company's Microsoft 365 software suite, competes against Google's Gemini AI for Google Workspace. Google last week had plenty to show off about the latest model, including a prototype of its impressive Project Astra AI agent.
Microsoft has also invested billions into OpenAI, which helped power the "new Bing" search product. Nadella touched on that important relationship, talking up GPT-4o's availability in Copilot and Azure AI.
Business Insider is liveblogging Microsoft's Build keynote, so scroll on for the latest highlights.
Kevin Scott asks the developer crowd to think big with AI, and especially about the potential for AI tools to "reduce suffering" around the world.
For example, he wonders if AI could help his mother with her sickness, if she had been able to upload her medical charts for AI analysis, she may have been able to benefit from its test recommendations.
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"This is a big deal," Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan tells the Microsoft CTO.
Every teacher in the US will have access to Khan Academy's "state of the art" teaching tools for free, Khan says.
He says he thinks teaching will be the first profession to really benefit from AI, and if they can win them over, students will follow.
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We see a Microsoft employee get some quick coding help with OpenAI's GPT-4o by using her phone camera to show the AI agent the Python code on her laptop screen.
The Scarlett Johansson-like "Sky" voice is gone, with a deeper, more robotic-sounding voice in its place. OpenAI pulled the "Sky" voice recently, and Johansson has since said that she was approached to voice GPT-4 last year but declined. After hearing a voice "eerily similar" to hers, she said she's lawyered up.
Scott says the OpenAI GPT-4o demo was conceived of and recorded in the last 24 hours, and its coding abilities give him hope that a "rusty" CTO could still dive back into coding if called upon to do so.
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He thanks developers for "all of the great shit you have made over the past year."
He shouts out the over 50,000 customers using Azure AI tools and the platform, ranging from small startups to Fortune 100 companies.
Specifically, he highlights some generative AI work done with Etsy to build features like the marketplace's new "gift mode."
"It is a really innovative way to figure out how to buy things for people who are really difficult to buy for," Scott says.
He then zooms out and reflects on the huge technological shift that AI represents, comparing it to the dawn of the internet. He also shouts out OpenAI's new GPT-4o model.
If you just look at AI compute over time, Scott says, the rate of increase in compute when applied to AI training has been increasing exponentially — and the point of diminishing returns hasn't been hit yet.
Microsoft is working to optimize the current frontier while also investing at "a pretty incredible rate" to "push the frontier forward," Scott says.
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Pavan Davuluri announces that Microsoft is "deepening" its partnership with Meta to bring Windows apps to the Quest that extend into 3D space.
We're seeing a clip about bringing volumetric Windows apps to Meta's Quest headsets.
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Pavan Davuluri runs a clip showing how Copilot can work in Xbox games.
We see footage of someone asking Copilot questions about how to complete an in-game task, and the AI agent helps out.
And don't forget the "Minecraft" example we saw earlier.
It sounds like Xbox players won't have to Google as much if they get stuck in a game.
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Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Windows + Devices, gets onstage to talk more about the big announcement from Monday: Copilot+ PCs.
Davuluri says the Copilot+ PCs are "redefining what you can do on a PC and setting the direction for the next decade of Windows."
He runs a sizzle reel about the new AI-powered computers, which integrate AI chips and processors along with AI apps, like "Recall," which acts as a "photographic memory" of sorts for your computer, making it easier to quickly find information anywhere on your PC.
"This new class of PCs is up to 20 times as powerful and 100 times as efficient for running AI workloads compared to traditional PCs from just a few years ago," he adds.
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Jeff Teper is here to talk about Copilot extensions and do some demos to show what it's like to create and use one.
This is the part of the Build keynote where the more in-depth technical demos come out, so our updates might be less frequent.
Teper talks about how you can "drill deeper" into a conversation with Copilot extensions, such as asking about a key feature of a delivery drone. Copilot will provide the necessary information quickly to cut down on having to ask a real person for that information.
Teper's next demo is in Sharepoint, as he creates a custom and secure Copilot extension.
You can publish Copilot extensions back to Sharepoint and Microsoft Teams afterward, where they're visible in a marketplace.
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Team Copilot goes beyond the individual user to help with project management.
It's a "valuable member of the team," and gets added to your chats and meetings — such as a "meeting facilitator" to keep conversations productive. It can tell the team in a meeting when it's time to move on to the next topic, and takes notes that anyone can add to.
Team Copilot keeps up-to-date information, including timely items or open issues that need to be addressed.
"The entire team will be more productive and collaborative," the video about Team Copilot says.
These features will be available to customers in preview later this year.
We're now hearing from Lumen, a company using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to help their sales staff. What normally takes hours can now take minutes, Lumen says. They've seen an increase in outbound calls by 40%.
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Rajesh Jha, executive vice president of Microsoft's Experiences + Devices Group, takes the stage to talk more about Copilot.
He says that "nearly 60%" of Fortune 500 companies now use Copilot.
Microsoft has added more than 150 Copilot capabilities since the start of this year, he adds.
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Microsoft's Team Copilot works in Microsoft's Teams workspace.
It can be your meeting facilitator when you're in Teams, creating agendas, tracking time, taking notes for you, Nadella says — it can even be your project manager.
He also talks about updates coming to Copilot Studio, where you can design your own Copilot AI agent and test it before you deploy it. You can then use the AI agent across multiple channels.
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Nadella announces GitHub Copilot and its extensions.
We're seeing a live demo where GitHub Copilot is asked in Spanish to build Java code.
GitHub Copiot is good at "keeping you in your flow across your entire day."
The GitHub Copilot Azure extension makes it possible to diagnose issues as you code and plan to implement changes.
We're also seeing the AI tool help come up with a development plan, and then getting its help in implementing the code for a developer.
Coders have long dreamed of "staying in the flow," Nadella says.
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Microsoft Fabric is the company's AI data analytics platform.
More than 11,000 organizations use it, Nadella says.
With the newly announced real-time intelligence capabilities coming to Fabric, customers can enjoy "instant actionable insights on streaming data."
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Khan Academy will use Microsoft's Phi-3, a family of small language models (SLMs), to make math tutoring more accessible; Khan Academy is making its AI assistant Khanmigo free to all US teachers.
In a clip, Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan says he expects the partnership to have a "dramatic impact on US education."
Nadella on stage says he's very excited to see the impact of the Khan Academy partnership.
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In the video, a man holds up a shoe to his computer and asks the Copilot AI agent if they're fit for a camping/hiking trip.
Copilot responds, and then the man tells the AI agent to identify the best shoe for the trip and add it to his cart. The man speaks Spanish for the next question and the AI agent responds in Spanish.
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"With Azure AI, we offer the broadest selection of frontier and open source models including LLMs and SLMs," Nadella says.
He mentions how GPT-4o is integrated into Azure AI already.
What OpenAI demoed last week, "that was pretty magical stuff," Nadella says.
OpenAI is Microsoft's "most strategic and most important partnership," Nadella says.
Copilot will also leverage GPT-4o, Nadella adds.
You can share your screen with Copilot, and have it help with whatever you're working on.
We're seeing a demo of someone playing "Minecraft" and talking to Copilot, which can see what's on the screen, to help the gamer craft and survive. It offers timely suggestions, like seeing shelter "now."
After the demo clip ends, Nadella announces that GPT-4o is now "generally available" on Azure AI.
Microsoft has "the most comprehensive world infrastructure" for AI, Nadella says.
"We're on track to have our data centers powered 100% by renewable energy by 2025," Nadella says.
The number of countries where its cloud-computing Azure AI services are available has quadrupled, he adds.
Microsoft will be among the first cloud providers to offer Nvidia's latest Blackwell AI chips, he said. The company has a "deep partnership with Nvidia," Nadella says.
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Nadella talks up the Copilot Library, with ready to use local APIs.
There are 40+ on-device models to use "out of the box," he adds.
He also shows a sizzle reel about Copilot+ PCs and the AI apps that are tightly integrated in the computers.
Nadella mentions some developer interactions over the past year that stuck out to him, and how the AI apps people are making are making an impact.
Nadella thanks those who "bringing the impact" of AI to the rest of the world.
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He's talking about key moments in Microsoft's history.
"It feels like we're yet again, at a moment like that," he says.
AI is reshaping "every layer of the tech stack," Nadella adds.
Microsoft has two real dreams, Nadella says: Can computers understand us instead of us having to understand computers? And, in a world of ever-increasing information, can computers help us reason, plan, and act more effectively on that information?
He says there are "real breakthroughs" on both fronts.
We're seeing a video about the "new era" of technology to kick things off. There's a snapshot of OpenAI's text-to-video image generator, Sora, in the video.
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"Looking forward to #MSBuild today, where we'll share how we're creating new opportunity for developers across every layer of the Copilot stack. Please join us," the Microsoft CEO posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday morning ahead of the keynote.
While plenty of developers and press will be in attendance, Microsoft has also made a livestream of the opening keynote available for those who prefer to watch and listen in real time.
But we'll be covering the highlights here too.
