An agentic web could be coming soon to a computer near you.
Agentic AI took center stage at Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference last week as the tech giant continues to pave a path toward an agent-powered future.
During the conference, which took place May 19–22 in Seattle, the tech giant unveiled more than 50 announcements related to its commitment to improving the developer workflows, including:
- A GitHub Copilot AI coding agent that is capable of fixing bugs, adding features, and other “low-to-medium complexity tasks.”
- A new open project, dubbed NLWeb, that will make it easier to turn websites into AI-powered apps and “play a similar role to HTML in the emerging agentic web.”
- The addition of xAI’s Grok 3 models to the Azure AI Foundry platform.
In a blog post highlighting some of its recent announcements, Microsoft said it was in the process of turning its vision of an agentic web into reality.
“We envision a world in which agents operate across individual, organizational, team, and end-to-end business contexts,” the tech giant wrote. “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.”
Power moves. Daniel Newman, CEO of the Futurum Group, a technology research and advisory firm, told IT Brew that Microsoft’s announcements at Build are indicative of it being “all in” on AI. Newman said the newly announced GitHub Copilot AI assistant reflects the progression in the industry toward AI-assisted coding.
“This is a big part of that kind of emerging story that we’ve heard, whether it’s been Satya, Andy Jassy, Thomas Kurian, and Sundar Pichai,” Newman said. “They’re all kind of talking about this evolution of moving to AI-enabled coding and this is another step…in that direction.”
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Meanwhile, Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai, an AI-powered DevOps platform company, said Microsoft’s latest move to host Grok models on its cloud, which may have some raising their eyebrows, is a strategic move on its part.
“Number one, I think they want as many workloads to be running on their infrastructures as they can,” Holt said. “And then number two, I think there is a recognition that there’s not going to be one winner when it comes to these large scale models and I think everybody is making sure that they are engaged with the kind of emerging leaders as well as looking at the next generation leaders, as well.”
On the way. Though bold, some say Microsoft’s bets on an agentic web may not be far-fetched. Newman, a self-proclaimed “technical optimist,” believes an agentic web is in the cards for the future, but said it will take time until it’s widely integrated.
“I do think we’re seeing agents working side by side with humans. I think agents are going to increasingly work in parallel and then in place of certain activities of humans, both in web and broader applications,” Newman said. “But I also think we have to have a balance [of] a bit of humility and a bit of patience in terms of how quickly these things progress and become sort of pervasive in our workflows.”