Microsoft & The Open Agentic Web

In the Age of Agents, Microsoft Wants to Be the Operating System of Everything.

May 20, 2025

At Build 2025, Microsoft made its thesis loud and clear: the next computing paradigm won’t be app-based. Or even cloud-based. It will be agentic.

And Satya Nadella doesn’t just want to build the agents - he wants to own the infrastructure they run on, the protocols they speak, and the interfaces they inhabit.

In their own words:

We envision a world in which agents operate across individual, organizational, team and end-to-end business contexts. This emerging vision of the internet is an open agentic web, where AI agents make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of users or organizations.

What does this look like in practice? Well, here’s the full Microsoft Build 2025 Book of News, but also here are my key takeaways:

🧠 From Copilot to Colony
The Copilot you met last year was a helpful assistant. The one Microsoft introduced this week is closer to an operating system - spawning autonomous agents, orchestrating them across domains, and tailoring them to your internal business graph. You don’t prompt it. You delegate to it.

1M agents built by >230k orgs (90% of the Fortune 500). And now with multi-agent orchestration and Copilot tuning, it’s becoming a low-code control room for enterprise automation.

The long game? Businesses will increasingly run on agent workstreams - for support tickets, HR queries, code refactoring, and more. And Microsoft is positioning itself as the Agent OS. The one your company runs on.

💼 Tenant Copilot + Agent Factory = SAP for AI
Microsoft’s “Tenant Copilot” gives every company its own AI identity. Think of it as a digital twin of your org: its norms, data, vocabulary. Then layer on Agent Factory - a tool to create and manage agents like employees.
It’s not a stretch to say Microsoft is rebuilding the enterprise stack - not with apps, but with a persistent mesh of AI workers that can act, learn, and improve.

🌐 Azure becomes the new app store — for agents

70k customers, 100T tokens processed last quarter (+5x YoY). Foundry isn’t just infra - it’s Microsoft’s answer to lowering the barriers to enterprise AI adoption. Bring your own model, build your own agent, run on Azure.
The addition of Grok to Azure AI Foundry wasn’t just about model diversity. It was a flex: Azure is where your agents will live, reason, and collaborate. With Microsoft pushing open standards like the Model Context Protocol, it’s clear they want Azure to be the interoperability layer for agents from anywhere.

🛠️ GitHub Copilot, reimagined
Microsoft quietly redefined the role of GitHub Copilot. It’s no longer autocomplete - it’s a peer programmer that can open pull requests and debug on its own. Another signal that “AI assistant” is dead. Long live the autonomous collaborator.

📡 NLWeb - Websites That Speak Agent

Tucked away in Build’s flood of updates was one of the more foundational announcements: NLWeb, an open protocol that turns websites into AI-native interfaces. Built on web standards (Schema.org, RSS, JSON) and supporting MCP, NLWeb lets agents interact with websites as structured endpoints. No scraping. No fragile simulations.

This changes the web from static content into conversational surfaces.

O’Reilly is using it for contextual document search
Eventbrite is powering personalized event discovery

In other words, the web isn’t being browsed — it’s being reasoned with.

Microsoft’s bet?If the des ktop era ran on files, and the mobile era on APIs - the agentic era will run on queryable endpoints. NLWeb is its blueprint.

🔬 AI for science, not just software. Microsoft also unveiled a new Discovery Platform for R&D - showing how multi-agent systems can generate advanced cooling system designs from cross-domain research. AI isn’t just automating tasks, it’s collaborating in scientific innovation.

Just like Windows and Office dominated the desktop era, Microsoft is positioning Copilot + Azure + Microsoft 365 as the backbone of the agent era.

That ambition is starting to show up not just in strategy - but in stock price.

📈 Microsoft is now up ~27% over the past 20 days - its best run in over 20 years. Why?

Because investors are starting to believe what Microsoft has been quietly building all along: Not just an AI feature set - but an AI developer platform with real enterprise pull.