News
Updates, product notes and practical coverage for AI platforms and operators.
Microsoft Discovery now supports an open-source NVIDIA BioNeMo agent that designs protein binders from natural-language requests using RFD4-Proteina. The integration packages model-specific biological expertise as reusable skills, keeps orchestration inside Azure and offers hosted or self-managed compute paths, while leaving candidate validation and consequential scientific decisions with researchers.
Microsoft has expanded the Azure Resource Manager MCP server with create and update operations, provider actions, stronger deployment controls, exact-resource reads and first-class cost tools. An experimental skills interface can return structured workflows for optimisation, policy and deployment, moving the server towards query, plan, act and verify operations for AI-assisted cloud management.
Microsoft is rolling out Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.2 to eligible users in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio. Work IQ grounds the model in organisational files, meetings, chats and business data under existing permissions, while administrators control availability through the Microsoft 365 admin centre during the rollout.
Microsoft has announced Classroom, a standalone Microsoft 365 education experience planned for preview in early 2027. It will combine assignments, grades, class notebooks, learning accelerators and insights with Teach in Copilot, the Study and Learn Agent and AI learning activities across web, desktop and mobile applications.
Microsoft has shown how Foundry agents can move from one-pass prompts to the Copilot harness for planning, looping, subagents and report completion. Hosted agents can also run third-party harnesses with Entra Agent ID, private networking, controlled egress, telemetry, governed toolboxes and organisation-specific benchmark-driven optimisation. It targets production-scale enterprise use.
Microsoft has made the Durable Task extension for Agent Framework generally available, enabling Python and .NET agents to recover from failures, resume long-running workflows and persist human-approval waits. It supports Azure Functions and self-hosted workers, with Durable Task Scheduler as the recommended backend, bringing explicit orchestration state to production agent applications.
Microsoft has made real-time multichannel speech-to-text generally available in Azure Speech, adding per-channel language identification while retaining stereo separation. The service transcribes up to two channels in one session, tags every result with its source and costs the same as single-channel transcription, targeting contact centres and voice-agent pipelines with overlapping speakers.
Microsoft has shown how ComfyUI can call Foundry image models and fal MiniMax H3 Max video generation through two custom nodes using Microsoft Entra ID instead of API keys. The workflow runs generation in Foundry, works from CPU-only clients and chains an art-directed keyframe into a five-second cinematic clip with managed identity controls.
Microsoft has outlined a closed-loop workflow that turns production agent traces into evaluation datasets, optimisation proposals, regression tests and controlled deployments. The Foundry approach uses continuous evaluation, Agent Optimizer, GitHub Actions and canary routing while keeping business criteria outside editable prompts, giving teams a more disciplined way to improve agents without silent regressions.
Microsoft is making the multi-model harness behind Copilot Code, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, the CLI and Visual Studio Code available through Microsoft Foundry. The managed orchestration layer supports more than 20 frontier models, bring-your-own-key access, MCP, agent skills and plugins, while Microsoft runs the agent loop and sandbox.
Microsoft has outlined its enterprise AI strategy around Copilot as the user entry point, Microsoft IQ and Foundry for organisational intelligence, and Agent 365 for governance and observability. The company highlighted large deployments at Volkswagen, Fujitsu, Manulife and others, alongside customer-reported gains in software delivery, service operations, document work and industrial maintenance.
Microsoft has expanded its Sovereign Cloud roadmap with a unified control panel, external key management, tamper-evident operator-access records and connected-to-disconnected Azure Local operations. Foundry Local and locally hosted GitHub Copilot models extend AI into customer-controlled environments, while partner-operated clouds add jurisdiction-specific choices for governments, critical infrastructure and regulated industries.
Microsoft has defined “agentic insiders” as overprivileged or unpredictable AI agents that can create insider-style risk without malicious intent. Its Project Perception research combines identity, data, cloud, endpoint, network and runtime signals to calculate dynamic risk, supervise agent actions and preserve evidence for security teams while keeping human judgement in control.
Microsoft has made more than 20 purpose-built legal skills generally available in Copilot, alongside plugins for research, document and matter management, signatures, specialist legal AI and e-discovery. Word preserves tracked changes and formatting, while approved SharePoint precedents, enterprise protections and explicit user approval keep lawyers responsible for final language.
Microsoft is introducing deterministic trust-aware processing in Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce indirect prompt-injection risk. Content marked untrusted can be quarantined, transformed through a constrained path and passed to the primary model with provenance, preventing raw embedded instructions from sharing the same authority as trusted prompts.
Microsoft’s September Copilot Studio update adds public-preview app creation alongside workflows and agents. Makers can generate interfaces from natural-language requirements, retain code access and deploy through a managed runtime with identity, governed data, lifecycle controls, Git-backed versioning and central visibility across Microsoft’s connected agent-building surfaces.
Microsoft is extending Dynamics 365 into Copilot and Teams with 30 CRM skills, a public-preview shared customer view and new autonomous sales and service agents. The approach keeps CRM as the trusted system of record while bringing context, actions, approvals and governed automation into employees’ existing collaboration tools.
Microsoft Execution Containers are now generally available as a policy-driven boundary for AI agents and generated workloads. Developers declare permitted files and network destinations while MXC enforces them outside the agent’s control, with process, session, WSL and experimental microVM isolation options across local and cloud environments.
Microsoft has embedded conversational chat into Microsoft 365 Copilot Search for Windows and the web. The October release lets search results become grounded context for follow-up questions, synthesis and content creation, reducing the need to move between separate discovery and chat experiences when working with organisational knowledge.
Microsoft says Copilot in SharePoint has reached general availability, with worldwide tenant rollout beginning 30 September. Everyday content questions, organisation and reusable skills remain within the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence; advanced collection-wide and creative tasks use Copilot Credits. SharePoint tools will also feed the broader Copilot app and Work IQ, with separate preview timelines.
Microsoft has announced a redesigned Copilot with Home for chat and delegated work, Code for building small applications, and Autopilot as a persistent agent. Home and Code begin Frontier rollout over coming weeks, while Autopilot expands to private preview at month-end. The launch also adds a managed app runtime and plugin catalogue, with availability differing by feature.
Microsoft has set out a two-part Copilot pricing model: per-user subscriptions for everyday Chat and Office assistance, and usage-based Copilot Credits for advanced work such as Cowork, Code and Autopilot. Enterprise metered services remain off until an administrator creates a spending policy. Budgets, caps and reporting are expanding, but teams should model their own workload costs.
Microsoft says it disrupted EvilTokens, an AI-assisted service used to analyse stolen email accounts and plan financial fraud. With partners, it seized 50 operating websites and disabled more than 150 related domains. The case highlights that resetting a password may not end an attacker’s session; organisations should review tokens, payment controls and suspicious mailbox access.
Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 G7 for US Government Community Cloud customers, combining Copilot, agents, identity and governance. G7 and Agent 365 are scheduled for purchase from 1 October, with capabilities expanding in phases as authorisations complete. This is a US government offer, not a general or Australian availability announcement.
xAI has released Grok as a Microsoft Outlook add-in for summarising threads, drafting replies and organising email. It is available to paid X and SuperGrok users, while important questions about enterprise administration, data handling and regional availability remain for organisations to verify.
Microsoft and Mistral have expanded their partnership through a multibillion-dollar commitment to European AI infrastructure. The agreement also brings Mistral Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 into Microsoft products, with deployment options spanning public cloud, Azure Local and disconnected environments.
xAI has released Grok for Excel as a free Microsoft 365 add-in. It can answer questions about selected spreadsheet data, generate formulas, create charts, run forecast scenarios and draw context from connected email or file services without requiring users to leave their workbook.
Microsoft is making GPT-5.6 the preferred model in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing OpenAI’s latest model family to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot Chat and Cowork. The upgrade promises better documents, deeper data analysis and more capable cross-functional AI workflows.