41 Looking more closely at the technology driving this innovation, what is Microsoft’s approach from an engineering perspective? Satish Thomas: As generative AI technology matures, we are entering the next phase: the autonomous enterprise, where organisations and people leverage technology, particularly AI and automation, to operate and adapt in an age of rapid transformation and innovation. Where there once was ‘an app for that’, there will now be ‘an agent for that’. This transformation isn’t just about automation, it’s about people. By putting intelligent agents in the hands of every employee, organisations are empowering individuals to focus on highervalue work, make decisions faster and drive innovation. Sales teams can deepen customer relationships without being bogged down by administrative tasks. Finance professionals can move from manual reconciliation to strategic forecasting. Marketers can go from idea to execution and product managers can orchestrate complex workflows with clarity and speed. When we think about AI-first companies, human ambition is a key part of it, augmented by a copilot. There will be a copilot for every user and an intelligent agent for every business process and of course, for each of those copilot experiences there might be multiple agents that enable them to scale that effort. So think of copilots as the UI for AI. And one of the things that you’ll hear in the context of the work we are doing is how we enable agent scenarios across business processes and industries that move from having humans with assistants to being human led, agent operated. This is where we are really thinking about how to reimagine our industry and business applications to enable our customers to become AI-first companies. Alongside the current generation of Microsoft cloud tools, could you give us a brief look at what’s next for AI? ST: First of all, our biggest differentiator as a company is the Microsoft Cloud. We’ve got planet scale infrastructure with Azure, industry leading low-code and low-code/no-code solutions with Power Platform, collaboration with Teams, business applications with Dynamics 365, and data and AI with Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Fabric – all underscored by a foundation of security, privacy and governance. When you think about the comprehensiveness of the Microsoft Cloud, we have a complete and very competitive technology stack for our customers and partners to build upon. We also have an innovative agent platform with Copilot Studio, which provides a standardised protocol for agents to seamlessly interact with our business and industry applications, helping to ensure consistency, reliability and scalability. What you can expect from us is that we will have out-ofthe-box agents for business processes across the enterprise and small to medium-sized businesses, industry-specific agents that help drive functions such as personalised shopping in retail, or factory operations in manufacturing. And at the limit, we are a partner company and will work closely with our partner ecosystem to enable them to take advantage of our platform and tools to extend and build agents to deliver the last mile of functionality for our customers. One of the latest innovations we’ve announced to accelerate the development of agents is the adoption and compliance with Model Context Protocol (MCP) across our business applications and development platforms. At our Build conference in May 2025, we announced MCP servers for Dynamics 365 enterprise resource planning and customer relationship maangement business applications, in addition to MCP support for our developer platforms such as GitHub and Copilot Studio. MCP standardises how applications provide context to large language models, enabling seamless integration with different data sources and tools. This open standard connects AI assistants and agents to various systems where data resides, such as content repositories, business tools and development environments. An MCP compliant agent uses rich contextual information to act efficiently, unlike a non-MCP compliant agent which lacks necessary context. “ Transformation isn’t just about automation, it’s about people” SATISH THOMAS EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
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